The One Minute I Regret Most

The empty two liter bottle stood naked, without its Diet Pepsi label or royal blue cap, prayerfully awaiting its execution. Fifteen paces of cropped, sun-bleached grass separated the victim from the tips of my Nike running shoes. “Here you go. Safety’s on,” said Bernie, handing me the Sig-Sauer. I took the pistol delicately, too delicately for such a masculine exchange. Such caution wasn’t allowed in front of my future father-in-law, who had finished casually blasting a Coke bottle to smithereens with a jauntily aimed .357 snub-nosed revolver. I shook my head, clearing out any fear as the fingers of my right hand closed confidently around the grip of the Sig. My left painted greasy sweat marks on the slide as I pulled it back, cocking the weapon’s hammer into the firing position. Slightly adjusting my stance, I raised the gun to eye level, simultaneously clicking the safety off with my right thumb.

A warm July breeze caused the bottle to shudder on the uneven ground of my in-laws’ pasture. Bernie stood beside me with a mostly empty can of Coors gripped wistfully in his left hand, the smoldering .357 hanging from his right, his eyes locked on my intended target. I glanced at him out of the corner of my eye, wondering if I would be able to impress him with a clean kill on the first shot. I had a knack with guns, a sort of natural talent that I had never discovered until, at the age of 15, one of my uncles took me to a firing range, put a 30.06 in my hand and said, “Let’s give it a shot.” On that day I hit a six inch wide paper plate rapped in aluminum foil from 200 yards with a rifle that had been manufactured forty years before I’d even been born. I hit the plate four times in a row, standing awkwardly with the heavy weapon weighing down my underdeveloped arms, the large industrial earmuffs making it nearly impossible to line my right eye up with tiny glass circle that was the rifle’s sight. On this July day, however, two years and a few hundred rounds later, I wasn’t encumbered by such inconveniences. I had assumed a well-practiced half-turned stance, easily held the pistol steady at arms length, and buried my chin in my right shoulder so that my good eye (the left one oddly enough) lined up with the gun’s irons. The gentle breeze ruffled my t-shirt and I saw the bottle shiver once more, this time as I aligned the three pieces of the gun’s sights just below the bottle’s middle. With a slight correction to compensate for my right-handed trigger pull, I had come to the moment of truth. My worries about Bernie’s reaction, the bottle’s seeming unwillingness to hold still, my unconventional firing position no longer mattered as the entirety of my mind concentrated on the musculature that would depress the Sig’s trigger.

The instinctive flinch that accompanies any loud noise can be tempered with practice, but such a roar as this weapon made shattered any habituated steadiness that I may have possessed. My eyes slammed shut in the millisecond it took the rather large bullet to escape the pistol’s barrel, its shell casing cartwheeling out of the breech, and travel the fifteen short yards to the bottle’s right side. As my eyes slammed back open, so too did the bullet careen into and through the Diet Pepsi bottle, which, despite having a large portion of its upper half removed in a single split-second, refused to topple over backwards. It stood perfectly still, a stillness that possessed me as well, enabling my arms to grow steadier, my mind to quickly calculate the position upon which I would place my sights, my finger to delicately apply the needed force to release the weapon’s hammer and hurl a second volley into the proud bottle. This time there was no flinch; neither was there a roar. The bottle was caught square in its middle, toppling backwards this time as the bullet ripped straight through, nearly cleaving its victim in two. Seeing my quarry fall, I moved to finish it off with a bang. Aiming slightly lower, I fired a third and final time, my arm’s absorption of the recoil the only sensation I seemed to feel. The bottle was hit in its upturned base near to the ground, the large caliber bullet causing the earth beneath it to jump up and hurl the bottle in a high arcing spiral to its final resting place a couple of feet away.

I unknotted my shoulders, lowering the volatile weapon and quickly engaging the safety. Bernie turned to me and said, “Mmm hmm umm hmm mmmm.” I saw the smile on his face, recognized the approval in his dancing eyes, but could not make out a word. I cocked my head to the left so that he spoke directly into my right ear. “You want to try the .357?” I nodded, trading pistols with him in a daze. It dawned on me that because of the odd position I had placed my head in to be able to aim with my left eye, my left ear had also been pointed directly towards the bellow of the Sig Sauer. When the first shot had gone off, my left eardrum was torn apart by the powerful waves of sound emanating from that twice deadly weapon.

I had not been wearing the oversized earmuffs my uncle had mandated on the firing range. I had perforated an ear drum, resulting in temporary hearing loss and permanent hearing deficiency in my left ear. I had nearly killed one of my most valuable senses executing a plastic bottle to impress a man who already loved me like a son. The high pitched squeal in my left ear that attends every silent moment tells me these facts. My own regret does the rest.